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Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

According to the latest SHSMD By the Numbers report, 25% of respondents who have gone through a hospital merger said their Marketing and Communications budget increased vs 15% who said it decreased.

Today is the first full day of the 2018 Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development Conference #SHSMD18 here in Seattle. In preparation, I thought it would be interesting to dive into the 6th edition of the By the Numbers Report recently published by SHSMD and the AHA Data Insights team.

This report is based on survey results collected from almost 2,700 respondents by SHSMD from August 2017 to January 2018. It provides a detailed snapshot of marketing & communications (marcom) at hospitals in the US. Overall, the report paints a rosy picture for marketing. The size of marketing teams is increasing, use of digital marketing tools/techniques is growing and the scope of responsibilities for Marketing departments is expanding.

Here are some of the interesting findings in the report.

Growth in Marketing & Communications Despite Hospital Consolidation

Consolidation is rampant. According to By the Numbers, the number of independent hospitals has dropped from 50% of respondents in 2013 to 30% in 2017. Selection bias was not a factor.

50% of respondents that had gone through a merger said that the marcom function had been centralized (multiple marcom departments merged into a single one). You would expect that this level of consolidation activity would have a negative affect on marcom budgets, but that wasn’t the case. Of those that had been through a merger:

By the Numbers shows that the average hospital budget in 2017 was $875M – an increase of 39% over the 2013 average of $533M. In that same time period, marcom budgets have grown 65% (adjusted for inflation) to an average of $5.4M.

While it is impressive that marcom budgets have increased at a faster pace than overall hospital budgets, at $5.4M it still represents less than 1% of the overall budget. For most other commercial entities, spending less than 1% on marketing would lead to slower growth and eventually to stagnation.

In 2017, Deloitte published a report that showed the average marketing budget as a percentage of overall budget for a variety of industries:

The Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals category included medical device makers, healthcare software companies and pharmaceutical companies – all of which have much larger marketing budgets compared to hospitals.

I asked Anne Feeney, Research and Data Analytics Specialist for SHSMD and one of the key people behind By the Numbers, why hospitals spend <1% on marcom.

“Some hospitals are the only player in a particular market,” said Feeney. “In those cases there is less need to spend marketing dollars attracting new patients. Also, healthcare has not yet experienced the same competitive pressures that dominate other industries, like consumer packaged goods. In healthcare it’s been as competitive as it has always been, but as an industry we have not risen to the levels of competition we see in other parts of the consumer world.”

Traditional Media Still Dominates Hospital Ad Spend

According to By the Numbers, hospitals are still spending the majority of their advertising budgets on traditional media – TV, newspapers and outdoors.

Median

Average

TV

$90,000

$270,859

Newspaper

$84,500

$143,810

Outdoor

$70,000

$153,278

Electronic ads

$56,000

$185,095

Pay-per-click

$51,050

$316,112

Radio

$50,000

$114,261

Content marketing

$33,500

$72,675

Magazines

$30,000

$55,227

Direct Mail

$30,000

$98,237

Brochures/print collateral

$30,000

$73,809

Search engine marketing

$22,000

$101,495

Mobile ads

$20,000

$108,846

Email

$18,500

$21,468

Social media

$15,000

$54,584

Location-based ads

$15,000

$21,289

What I found most interesting is the difference between the Pay-per-click median ($51,050) and average ($316,112). This large delta suggests that the data is highly skewed – meaning that there are some hospitals that are spending a lot more than their peers on Pay-per-click. I believe these high-spending hospitals have discovered something that B2C companies have known for a long time – pay-per-click advertising works. With this knowledge they are exploiting an advantage that their competitors have failed to recognize.

Other Highlights

Marketing Departments are watching review and ratings sites. 50% of respondents said they actively monitor existing ratings and review sites on behalf of their hospital

Hospitals spend very little on marketing professional development. By the Numbers found that the median spent by marcom in this area was a paltry $6,500 per hospital

Social media is still used mostly for broadcasting messages vs patient engagement.

“Among our respondents, the social media stalwarts—Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter—were the most commonly used platforms,” said Lisa Isom, Assistant Director of Digital Content and Social Media, Montefiore Health System. “However, few survey respondents report use of these platforms for engagement and development of the types of conversations that build and/or enhance brand awareness. YouTube was most commonly used as a broadcasting medium for one-way communications. Facebook, on the other hand, was far more likely to be used for two-way communications, which saw respondents taking advantage of its capacity both to share information and engage in interactions. Twitter, the third most commonly used, was used primarily to broadcast news.”

For Feeney, the key takeaway from By the Numbers was the movement towards ROI metrics in marketing: “Marketing used to be seen as a fixed cost. Hospitals are doing so much more now to measure the ROI of marketing & communications. It’s good to see this focus on marketing efficiency, even though as a % of revenue remains small compared to the overall healthcare budget. ROI means marketing is more strategic and can grow if can show ROI.”

For me the report’s key message is it’s time for healthcare marketers to seize the moment and become more strategically relevant in their organizations. The SHSMD data clearly shows that healthcare Marketing departments are being asked to take on more and more responsibilities – from managing the hospital’s reputation to operationalizing patient engagement. This expansion in scope is a perfect time to shine.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of these shining examples on Day 2 and Day 3 of #SHSMD18

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

The Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) recently released the second edition of Bridging Worlds: The Future Role of the Healthcare Strategist. This update to the original 2014 report outlines five key imperatives that SHSMD believes are needed for healthcare success:

Be nimble to exceed the rate of change

Create consumer experiences, tell powerful stories

Integrate and co-create

Erase Boundaries of Business

Generate Data-Driven Insights

“One of the biggest changes from the 2014 edition and one of the biggest opportunities that has come to the forefront is consumerism” says Holly Sullivan, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Spectrum Health and Vice Chair of SHSMD’s Bridging Worlds Committee, “It’s up to us as Strategists and Marketers to embrace this new reality and help our organizations adapt to this new level of expectation from patients. It’s definitely something that’s right in front of the windshield.”

Investing in technologies that improve and transform the patient experience will be key to meeting these heightened expectations including telemedicine, wearables, remote patient monitoring and artificial intelligence. However, technology alone will not lead to success, healthcare organizations will also need to break down their walls and collaborate in a more frictionless manner.

According to Sullivan: “Culture is the biggest challenge here. Historically healthcare organizations don’t like to share the sandbox and have believed they can do it all, own it all. We need to help our organizations lift their heads and see what’s coming at us down the road. We need to educate people that partnerships are an imperative.”

This need for collaboration and partnership is captured in the “Erase Boundaries of Business” section of the Bridging Worlds report. That portion of the report also encourages Strategists to think well beyond the walls of their organizations.

“We have to stop thinking of healthcare as a place where you go when you are sick,” adds Donna Teach, Chief Marketing and Communication Officer at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Chair of SHSMD’s Bridging Worlds Committee. “Care is now anywhere the patient is and we need to engage patients through their entire healthcare journey rather than just points in time. Patients want to use new technologies like telemedicine and remote monitoring because it’s easy, convenient and fits nicely into their daily lives.”

Embracing HealthIT technologies permeates Bridging Worlds and Big Data in particular seems to hold the most potential in the eyes of the report authors: “Most importantly, data is only useful if it generates insights that enable better decision making. New tools, including predictive models and artificial intelligence, allow regular users to connect and visualize large volumes of data from multiple sources in ways that generate actionable insights.”

“EMRs + Big Data is just the tip of the iceberg”, echoes Teach. “It’s a technology will fundamentally change healthcare.”

Bridging Worlds is a useful guide. It clearly outlines the skills that Healthcare Strategists and Marketers will need to master in order to help their organizations transition from old models of care. Sprinkled throughout the report are useful instructions and examples of how to practice the skills and knowledge being outlined.

The key takeaway from report? “Marketing Strategists can be the agent of change no matter what level they are.” says Sullivan, “That’s the one key idea that I hope people will take from reading Bridging Worlds.”